October 2014

The News Industry

January 14, 2009

A few days ago, we ran an important item on the assassination of Lasantha Wickramatunga, editor of Sri Lanka's Sunday Leader newspaper and a major critic of the government. Like other things Sri Lankan, Lasantha's death may not resonate far beyond the island: to outsiders, this may seem to be a bit verse in yet another epic ethnic conflict. But even if you read nothing else about Sri Lanka, please read the piece below, printed by his paper after his death.

It was, in a sense, Lasantha's final work, an essay he wrote with the understanding that he would be killed for what he did. If, as a journalist, you've fretted about your pay, or job security, or career prospects, read Lasantha's words and remember this: at its finest, its most tenacious, journalism is heroic.

I have read it twice--once at work, and a second time on the subway--and each time, it broke me.

And Then They Came for Me

By Lasantha Wickramatunga

No other profession calls on its
practitioners to lay down their lives for
their art save the armed forces and, in Sri
Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past
few years, the independent media have
increasingly come under attack. Electronic
and print-media institutions have been
burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless
journalists have been harassed, threatened
and killed. It has been my honour to belong
to all those categories and now especially
the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a
good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The
Sunday Leader's 15th year. Many things have
changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and
it does not need me to tell you that the
greater part of that change has been for the
worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a
civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by
protagonists whose bloodlust knows no
bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by
terrorists or the state, has become the
order of the day. Indeed, murder has become
the primary tool whereby the state seeks to
control the organs of liberty. Today it is
the journalists, tomorrow it will be the
judges. For neither group have the risks
ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that.
After all, I too am a husband, and the
father of three wonderful children. I too
have responsibilities and obligations that
transcend my profession, be it the law or
journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many
people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to
revert to the bar, and goodness knows it
offers a better and safer livelihood.
Others, including political leaders on both
sides, have at various times sought to
induce me to take to politics, going so far
as to offer me ministries of my choice.
Diplomats, recognising the risk journalists
face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe
passage and the right of residence in their
countries. Whatever else I may have been
stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above
high office, fame, lucre and security. It is
the call of conscience.

November 19, 2008

The very generous folks at Typepad (which SAJA uses for SAJAForum) seem to have a plan for "recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist[s]." They call it the The Typepad Journalist Bailout Program.

Your Tumblr, while clever, will not pay your bills. We want to fix that. So we've made the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program.
While we can't promise it's going to replace having a full-time writing
gig, it gets you up and running with your own site that you can start
to benefit from. Let's outline the details, in true Digg-baiting
listicle format:

You get a free TypePad Pro blog account.
That's the real deal, the same service that powers big-name media
blogs, and it even includes professional support so we answer any
questions you have.

You get enrolled in the Six Apart Media advertising program. These are real display ads, that pay a lot more than simple Google text ads, and you get to keep the revenue.

We'll promote your new site on Blogs.com.
It's a fast-growing directory of the best in blogs, and Blogs.com will
be a very effective way for all of your peers in the Journalist Bailout
Program to cross-promote and share traffic for your independent sites.

Lots more. Getting started with Six Apart opens
the door to lots more ways to succeed in the future. We can introduce
you to our VIP program to help drive traffic to your site, help you
connect your blog to your LinkedIn profile, make it easy to manage your
site's comments from an iPhone, and even show you how to automatically
promote your posts to your Facebook friends.

And while they don't mention if the ad revenue is enough to buy your groceries, this definitely sounds like a cool deal. You save 150 dollars and your blogs will have a professional look with non-google-looking ads. But when it comes to searching your name on Google, your blog will still be a first result.We'd love to hear your thoughts on this program. Post them below.

Newspaper publishers should consider
consolidating and outsourcing news operations — even overseas — to save
money as revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S.
newspaper company said Monday. <snip>

"In today's world, whether your desk is down the
hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't
matter," Singleton said after his speech. <snip>

Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.

"One thing we're exploring is having one news
desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore,"
he said during the speech.

Other publishers also have consolidated newsroom
functions this year. Two Florida papers owned by The New York Times Co.
said in August they were merging news and copy desk functions, design,
layout and pagination. The McClatchy Co. papers in Raleigh and
Charlotte, are sharing sports and political reporting staff.

But few have sent newsroom functions overseas,
limiting off-shoring mostly to ad production and other non-editorial
functions, said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with Outsell Inc.

Notable exceptions are Thomson Reuters, which
has been using journalists in Bangalore, India, to handle some basic
news such as corporate earnings reports, and a website called pasadenanow.com,
which has five regular contributors overseas who write about Pasadena,
Calif., using webcasts of council meetings and information provided by
citizen volunteers.

Well, Bay Area News Group (BANG)
staffers decided Dean's words needed illustration. They created a new
map showing the familiar newspaper titles, including the once-proud San
Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and Marin
Independent-Journal (with the Santa Cruz Sentinel written in) spread
across the western India states of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the latter
the state dominated by Mumbai, a major outsourcing center.

Here it is, in all its glory, photographed from one of its postings on a newspaper bulletin board.

At
US papers, outsourcing of ad production has reached major proportions.
Finance outsourcing is in process, and yes, newspapers are looking at
what can't be done by lower-paid, English speakers.

Though farther-flung circulation is still being cut back at the dailies
-- that's still publishers' favorite explanation for plummeting
circulation -- maybe the move of the nameplates could be a smart
counter-intuitive strategy.

After all, in India, newspaper readership keeps going up.

He also ran these stats from the World Association of Newspapers 2008 Trends report:

74 of the world’s 100 best selling dailies are published in Asia. China, Japan and India account for 62 of them.

The
five largest markets for newspapers are: China, with 107 million copies
sold daily; India, with 99 million copies daily; Japan, with 68 million
copies daily; the United States, with nearly 51 million; and Germany,
20.6 million.

Indian newspaper sales increased 11.22 percent in 2007 and 35.51 percent in the five-year period.

I'm feeling more than a bit xenophobic these days, and I'm blaming it
on the movement to outsource newspaper copy editing services to India.

I was interviewed on this topic recently for a public radio program in
New York City called "The Takeaway" with John Hockenberry and Adaora
Udoji.

The conversation featured a 26-year-old American copy editor, Hayden Simms, whose bright eyes and bushy tail could not protect him from a Miami Herald pink slip. The premise of the program was that Simms lost his copy editing job to India and its pool of cheaper labor.

On
the line with me was Harsh Dutta, a gracious and highly intelligent man
from India and co-founder of Content Writing India in New Delhi, which
runs a copy editing service for clients across the world, including
newspapers in the U.S. of A.Dutta admitted that Indian copy
editors were trained in "the Queen's English" and had to be schooled in
the peculiarities of the American idiom. I have no doubt that our copy
editing colleagues in India have enough language competence to learn
the difference between labor and labour
and to put the comma inside quotations marks, thank you. Language,
syntax, spelling and idioms are all important, but are beside the point.

November 01, 2008

A guest post by Anuradha Herath, a Columbia Journalism School student: anuradha.herath[at]gmail

Notes from Time Warner Summit Politics 2008

By Anuradha K. Herath

A gathering of leading media organizations, journalists, analysts and political insiders gathered in New York in mid-October for “Politics 2008 – The Media Summit on the Election of the President.” The event, co-hosted by CNN and TIME, took place Oct. 13 and 14, two days before the final presidential debate at Hofstra University (see the full program).

Two days of presentations and discussion sessions focused on a variety of topics pertaining to the 2008 presidential election and the changing media landscape. The two prominent South Asians that took part as panelists included Fareed Zakaria, host of GPS on CNN and editor of Newsweek International, and deputy managing editor of TIME, Romesh Ratnesar. Other participants included a host of media personalities:

Columbia journalism student Insiyah Saeed attended a panel titled “Defining the American Experience – The State of the Global Superpower – How the World Sees Us – How We See the World.” Panelists included Zakaria, Blitzer, Amanpour and Ratnesar, among others.

Saeed said she found it useful to hear journalists and commentators talk unscripted about their views.

“They really do know their stuff,” Saeed said. “It was very useful and insightful, and (there were) a lot of things I did not know. For journalists, it’s great to go to such a panel and hear them in person. It’s not like listening to a sound bite.”

October 06, 2008

That's Famous Magazine Editor Tina Brown (former editor of The New Yorker, Talk), sitting with cup in hand, in a staff photo that's part of the launch of The Daily Beast, her latest venture (I swear I am not posting it just because of the South Asian gent on the far right... but anyone know who he is? UPDATE: he's Amish Gandhi, director of product there - helps run the website, mobile and other products).

From the site's first day and a Q&A with her:

What is The Daily Beast? It's a speedy, smart edit of the web from the merciless point of
view of what interests the editors. The Daily Beast is the omnivorous
friend who hears about the best stuff and forwards it to you with a
twist. It allows you to lead the conversation, rather than simply
follow it.

Does the world really need another news aggregator? The Daily Beast doesn't aggregate. It sifts, sorts, and curates.
We're as much about what's not there as what is. And we freshen the
stream with a good helping of our own original content from a
wonderfully diverse group of contributors … satirist Christopher
Buckley, historian Sean Wilentz, former McCain adviser Mark McKinnon, Project Runway’s
Laura Bennett, the former editor of Al-Hayat Salameh Nematt, Facebook’s
Randi Zuckerberg, Nick Ciarelli who founded Think Secret, and many
others.

She addresses head-on the question of her leaving The New Yorker in 1998 (among other things, SAJAforum readers are likely to remember the big special fiction issue that she ran in 1997 commemorating the 50th anniversary of India's independence):

Was quitting The New Yorker the biggest mistake of your life? To every thing (turn turn turn) there is a season. If I'd stayed at
The New Yorker I'd never have written a best seller. More important,
there'd be no such animal as The Daily Beast. I have the best of both
worlds. I can edit The Daily Beast and read The New Yorker.

August 06, 2008

SAJAforum's editor, Arun Vengopal (whose day job is as a reporter for WNYC Radio), has a piece in Salon that looks at a phenomenon that didn't exist a few years ago. U.S. journalists heading to India for work. From "Journalists Seeking Paychecks? Try India":

So, what's an underemployed journalist to do? Some move on to academia or cross over to the dark side of public relations. But a few forward-thinking souls are heading to a land where journalism jobs not only aren't disappearing, but are more plentiful by the day: India.

In recent years, India's steamroller economy has diversified well beyond tech and outsourcing, including a big boom in the news media. Circulation has been steadily growing at Indian newspapers, and new dailies and magazines are popping up on a monthly basis. Among the new serious business publications that cater to the economic elites (or aspiring elites) is Mint, edited by Raju Narisetti. Narisetti is the former editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe, and before that served as deputy managing editor of the U.S. edition, which helped him lure several journalists from the U.S.

"Mint has a handful of American citizens in its newsroom, including me," he wrote me. "India is a fascinating country where history is being made in many respects so it is a fertile place for good journalism. Hopefully some of the non-Indian journalists will have a better understanding of India when they do go back."

Foreign journalists aren't the only ones taking advantage of India's growth. Rolling Stone has also launched an Indian edition, following Vogue, FHM and Maxim. People magazine's local edition is launching soon. However, the growth is even greater in the non-English media, in part because rural and small-town India are becoming more literate and have more disposable income.

June 30, 2008

Working at Yoga + Joyful Living magazine--and serving as a certified Sivananda yoga instructor--have opened my eyes to our expansive national yoga community. Downward dog pose, ayurveda and sun salutation have become household words, if not household practice. And commerce has kept pace: From the first time that batik-clad flower children got a whiff of yogic practice, the market started to integrate the nirvana-bound consumer with everything from hemp pants to rudraksha malas.

About 16 million Americans now practice yoga, and there are dozens of spiritually inclined publications catering to them. Today, yoga magazines are fixtures at newsstands and on coffee tables, amidst Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and are supported mostly by the demographic of 25-45 year-old women (some marketers call them Yoga Mamas). Here are some of the top yoga publications:

Yoga Journal – Founded in 1975 by members of the California Yoga Teacher’s Association, YJ hit mainstream circulation in 1990 and has continued to grow to its current readership of over a million. As the most popular yoga magazine in the country, YJ also features an extensive Web site with links for the yoga community. The publication is a glossy amalgam of trendy new-age style, health tips, travel and practice.

Yoga + Joyful Living – Produced from the non-profit Himalayan Institute, this bi-monthly
magazine was founded in the 90s by Swami Rama as a response to the
watering down of traditional yoga practice he was witnessing. Featuring
articles from renowned spiritual teachers Rolf Sovik, Rod Stryker and
Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Yoga+ covers topics of holistic living,
classical yoga scriptures, journeys and spirituality in action.

June 21, 2008

The
list of hires is impressive: So far in 2008, eight South Asian
journalists have been named to a range of leadership positions, from
managing editor to bureau chief.

Those who care about diversity in media find that heartening, but warn that more needs to be done.

Recruiters
at the 2008 SAJA convention were both optimistic and cautious when
asked about the state of diversity in the county's newsrooms.

"More
than one third of the American population is made up of people of
color, but nowhere near that level of diversity is represented in the
newsroom," said Ernest Sottomayor, Assistant Dean of Career Services at
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

"Media
companies need to have basic understanding that diversity is as
important as accuracy," he said. "Our communities are getting more and more
diverse and they need to get their views into the paper."

Despite the changes to the news business in the past decade, the basics of journalism remain the same.

These and other views on journalism, digital media, and diversity were shared by Michael Golden (top), vice chairman of the New York Times Company, and John Geddes (bottom), managing editor of its flagship newspaper, at a reception the paper hosted for attendees of the South Asian Journalists Association convention.

“In 30 years in this business I have never seen a time when there is so much change and so much at stake,” Golden said. “It is truly remarkable what’s going on right now.”

Golden drew attention to the crisis in the print
media, especially in large cities like Dallas and Chicago
where newspaper subscriptions are on a decline, and advertising
revenues are “falling at an alarming rate.”

Changes in the ways people consume information, the economic downturn
induced tightening of household budgets and advertiser spending have
added to this gloomy picture, he said.

Golden said the core of the Times' success and strategy is its editorial content.

Geddes, one of the paper's two managing editors (the other is Jill Abramson), added that the accuracy of the
Times in reporting the news has helped maintain its credibility among
readers. "Telling truth and being accurate pays off,” Geddes said.

NYTimes.com's growing web audience, which reached 21 million users last month, has helped the Times broaden its reach to people across the country and the globe, Golden said. The Times
has had to focus on the kind of information people want, and package it
and present it the way they want it. “It has a mass market appeal,”
Golden said.

But the Web site's popularity doesn't mean the newspaper will go away. “Print will be with us for a long time,” he said.

But the broader coverage has helped the Times boost diversity within
the newsroom, Golden said. In the past year, 14 percent of the Times'
organization's new hires were of Asian descent.

Read full coverage of Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal's speech here.

The 2008 SAJA Convention's opening keynote speech was delivered Robert Thomson, the new managing editor of the Wall Street Journal. It was one of his first public appearances since getting his new assignment last month. You can read full coverage of it here. Here are several short videos of major parts of his talk, from the just-launched SAJAtv channel on YouTube.